Probing the Link Between Slaughterhouses and Violent CrimeAn Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

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“I have a graph that shows that as the number of slaughterhouse
workers in a community increases, the crime rate also increases,” she says.
Fitzgerald says she was inspired by The Jungle to study crime records in
U.S. communities where slaughterhouses are located.

To author Upton Sinclair, the hellish world of factory slaughterhouses
was as dangerous to human beings as it was to pigs. He filled his 1906 novel
The Jungle with meat-packing images that seem ripped from a slasher movie:

... and as for the other men, who worked in
tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the
level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats;
and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be
worth exhibiting — sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but
the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!

Sinclair’s abattoir labourers get so desensitized to violence that rates
of murder, rape and brawls among them rise. The book cemented the link
between slaughterhouses and crime for decades to come — long before pig
farmer and serial killer Robert Pickton haunted headlines.

More than a hundred years later, a University of Windsor researcher may
have proven the literary classic right. Criminology professor Amy Fitzgerald
says statistics show the link between slaughterhouses and brutal crime is
empirical fact.

In a recent study, Fitzgerald crunched numbers from the FBI’s Uniform
Crime Report database, census data, and arrest and offence reports from 581
U.S. counties from 1994 to 2002.

“I have a graph that shows that as the number of slaughterhouse workers
in a community increases, the crime rate also increases,” she says.
Fitzgerald says she was inspired by The Jungle to study crime records in
U.S. communities where slaughterhouses are located.

She became fascinated by studies of the environmental effects of
slaughterhouses that mentioned crime rates, without explanation, seemed to
go up when the factories opened in communities.

Fitzgerald carefully weighed the figures in order to see whether a link
really existed. She found that an average-sized slaughterhouse with 175
employees would annually increase the number of arrests by 2.24 and the
number of reports by 4.69. The larger the abattoir, the worse the local
crime problem.

She controlled for factors such as the influx of new residents when
slaughterhouses open, high numbers of young men — even the number of
immigrants.

“Some residents started to recognize that the crime rates were going up
and started complaining, and the slaughterhouse companies were quick to
blame the immigrant labour pool they were relying on,” Fitzgerald says. She
found that abattoirs still seemed to raise the crime numbers when she
controlled for these factors.

Nor can the violence be blamed on factory work itself. Fitzgerald
compared slaughterhouse communities to those with comparison industries —
dangerous, repetitive work that did not involve killing animals. These were
not associated with a rise in crime at all, she says. In some cases, they
seemed to bring the crime rate down.

“The unique thing about (abattoirs) is that (workers are) not dealing
with inanimate objects, but instead dealing with live animals coming in and
then killing them, and processing what’s left of them.”

More studies are needed to determine if crimes were being committed by
factory workers or by others in the community, she says, and how exactly
that kind of work could cause crime to go up. But the numbers leave few
other explanations other than the slaughterhouses being somehow to blame.

It’s a case of science catching up to what has been folk knowledge since
industrialized slaughterhouses began to appear in the 19th century: workers
exposed to the killing of large numbers of animals on a regular basis become
disturbed and appear to lose empathy.

The Jungle made such anecdotal tales a mass scandal, galvanizing readers
and prompting President Theodore Roosevelt to order reforms to the meat
industry. Within months of publication, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the
Meat Inspection Act were signed into law. Sinclair’s book advocated
socialist ideals as an alternative to the exploitation of labour epitomized
by the factory abattoirs.

Buts the etiology of the problem remains something of a chicken-and-egg
puzzle. Do slaughterhouses desensitize workers to killing? Or, could the
work attract people who are less sensitive to begin with?

Fitzgerald suggests a similarity between slaughterhouse communities and
military communities, which have been studied for higher incidence rates of
partner abuse.

“One of (the explanations) is the violence they witness and sometimes
have to participate in might result in some kind of desensitization,” she
says. But the correlation was not as strong for smaller farms where animals
were killed.

“It seems like there’s something about the industrialization process,”
says Fitzgerald. “you have people who are actually responsible for
slaughtering thousands of animals a day.”

Canadian slaughterhouses were left out of the report, and Fitzgerald says
she wants to do a similar study here in the future. In Toronto, where
abattoirs have been nestled in quiet areas such as the Junction (before it
burned down in 2006) and King Street West, the violence seems hard to spot.

Residents of the pretty, tree-lined Garrison Creek neighbourhood say the
only time they notice Toronto Abattoirs Ltd. and Quality Meat Packers Ltd.
factory at the bottom of Tecumseth St. is on warmer days, when a putrid
scent wafts over the patios and the nearby baseball field.

“On good days it’s like a farm,” says Antonio Ferreira, a 15-year
resident of a red-brick highrise at King St. W. and Niagara St. “On a bad
day it’s like a rotting carcass.” He couldn’t recall any violent incidents
at or near the abattoir, however.

Workers trickling out of Toronto Abattoirs’ revolving turnstile simply
said that they liked working there “fine,” but wouldn’t say more about what
their jobs were like.

Although slaughterhouse conditions have improved immensely since Sinclair
published his scathing descriptions of disease-ridden equipment and slave
wages, they still exist to do one job: the methodical butchering of animals
on a massive scale. And that job still requires people to do it.

“There is something unique about the slaughterhouses,” says Fitzgerald.
“There’s definitely a need for further research to figure out exactly what
that is.”

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